Sandwich Porn

The butchers at Brooklyn’s popular Meathook Sandwich will teach you how to create a perfect Italian hero.

All it takes is weeks of heated debate, two days of prep, and a liberal arts degree.

Interview by Kati Krause
Photographs by Jake Chessum

Day 1

“If you look at a sandwich in a critical sense, the many moving parts of a sandwich, this is about how we can control as many of these parts as possible.” — Gil

“People are very opinionated when it comes to something as approachable as a sandwich. Imagine you went to see a show, and before the band’s playing you went up to them and said: ‘Hey, I’ve heard a lot about you guys, you guys are great. But you know what? There’s this band back where I’m from that’s amazing. They play the best. The best. Anyway, good luck!’” — Gil

“So they come up and say: ‘Hey, this place is great! What have you got here? Ah, Italian sandwich. Man, I’m from Jersey. Back home in Jersey, Johnny’s Deli, best Italian I’ve ever had. Anyway, can you get me one of those so I can try it? You know, compare the two?’” — Gil

“We take what you know is familiar and do hard riffs on it based on our strengths. We fuck with your expectations while also giving you exactly what you expect at the same time.” — Ben

“With the Italian sandwich, you want every bite to include everything. Because it’s sitting in perfect balance. There’s salt, there’s fat, there’s spice, there’s blandness, there’s tang, there’s bite, there’s sour… And you need all of those components. If you had a bite of this delicious pepperoni with a bite of delicious hot pepper, you’d think, fantastic! That was delicious! I can only have one bite. I cannot have five of these bites. Because your palate is being inundated with high notes. And you need some bass notes to carry the melody along.” — Gil

“No one ever wants to say bland. No one ever thinks of bland as a vital component but it is. And there’s no other way of really describing that. You need blandness.” — Gil

“Everyone here has a liberal arts degree. There are lots of accidental butchers.” — Ben

Day 2

“The pepperoni, you have to ferment it, because that’s how it gets its tang. You introduce lactic acid to the sugars inside the meat that are already there naturally. And after about 16 to 24 hours those lactic acid molecules start eating all those sugars and converting them to acids. We leave it sitting on this table for two days, at room temperatures. You deliberately let it spoil.” — Ben

“We need to grate the lettuce because it needs to act like trees in an avalanche, hold some of this back and hold it all together.” — Ben

“We really like iceberg lettuce because it’s pure water. It’s like eating water. It’s the ice in your cocktail, it gives it a certain temperature, a certain texture, and a certain amount of palatability. The same way that you add water to your scotch to dose the alcohol burn and give you all the nuances of the scotch, that lettuce is sort of playing the same role. It’s making the pepperoni an experience that makes you want to spend 10 minutes eating a sandwich.” — Gil

“The bread holds it together. There are people who say that the bread is completely superfluous. But I’d say that it’s the sponge. I guess there are some things that are, to use a baseball analogy, mid-relief. They don’t play a prominent role at all. They’re there when the other things get a little bit coy.” — Gil

“Everybody gets ass-hurt a little bit at some point. We’ve been doing it for years. Your opinion is not always going to win. You get your feelings hurt for 30 seconds but then you have to swallow your stupid pride and get back on the horse. We all go through that pretty much every single day. That’s part of it.” — Ben

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